Hmm. Where to begin? Probably early last month, when we discovered some performance problems with the Radeon HD 7950 in recent games using our newfangled testing methods, which focus on frame rendering times rather than simple FPS averages. Eventually, AMD acknowledged the problem and pledged to address the issues of high-latency frames in a series of driver updates.

Happily, we didn't have to wait long for the first update in that series. Within a day or two, AMD provided us a Catalyst 13.2 beta driver that includes fixes intended to improve frame rendering times in several of the DirectX 9 based games in our test suite: Skryim, Borderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2. Our report on this driver was delayed by a couple of factors, including our attendance at CES and an apparent incompatibility between this beta driver and our Sapphire 7950 card.